Interviews with EDF President Fred Krupp

This post is by Sheryl Canter, an Online Writer and Editorial Manager at Environmental Defense Fund.

Last week I wrote about the TreeHugger interview with EDF President Fred Krupp and Miriam Horn about their new book. Earth: The Sequel is an engaging look at emerging technology in the fight to stop global warming.

Fred has been getting around quite a bit lately. This week he also was interviewed by Forbes, Newsweek, and Mercury News. Each had a slightly different focus. Here are some excerpts:

On why a carbon tax won’t work, from the Forbes interview:

There’s no example of an air pollution problem anywhere in the world that has been solved without a cap or legal limit on how much of that pollution can be dumped into the sky. A cap gives you that legal limit, where a tax allows people to potentially keep on paying a modest amount and keep on polluting.

On biofuels, from the Newsweek interview:

I think we’ve come to understand that the current generation of biofuels has problems and that we need a whole new generation. In the short-term, turning sugar into fuels other than ethanol would have many advantages, given the infrastructure problems ethanol creates. In the long-term, we are much better off when entrepreneurs develop ways to turn wood and fiber, not food, into energy.

On the power of markets, from the Mercury News interview:

Last night, we were up on Sand Hill Road. Somebody told me he had been walking around in a kind of funk, a depression. But, he said, now that he’s seen this future, he’s already starting to feel better. It’s not a message that we can disengage. It’s not a message that technology can solve it. It is a message that if government does the right thing, and if we put that entrepreneurism to work in service of a new profit motive that’s been designed to create the very things we need to have a future, wow, watch what happens, such as a $1.9 billion order for Applied Materials to make solar cells.